The antidote to ideologies

THE SATURDAY ESSAY: How the Bollocks Culture came of age

A mad, minority approach to capitalism is being fostered by the misuse of media made more diverse and effective by technology. Confusion and doubt are sown through false witness and Mammon’s mouthpieces. The result has been a catastrophic division of the Resistance, and the passive acceptance of the status quo by frustrated and time-starved strugglers in the working population. The Slog analyses why and how this happened, and asks – with increasing concern – whether the will is there to stop the process.

The Slog is six years old this year. The name is short for Bollockslog…a log of bollocks being fed to us in a constant stream for one reason or another: blind ideology, fiscal scams, internet fraud, political gain and so forth. From time to time since, I’ve posted stuff that ends with the acronym Iabato! – it’s all bollocks and that’s official. This is a potted history laid out for the benefit of newer readers. It is succinct – dare I say even elegantly simple. Nothing else in contemporary life is…and that reality is destroying our freedoms.

Over those six years, three fundamental changes have occurred in the nature of bollocks. First and most obviously, it is almost ubiquitous today. Second, it gets increasingly puerile, superficial, easy to deconstruct and predictable with every week. And finally, it has moved on from being what I would call ‘useful’, short term bollocks to the construction of detailed, pernicious and rigidly observed ‘absolute truth’ bollocks, the doubting of which gets one labelled as an NVE (non-violent extremist) by governments, or “a sicko” by rabid blogger disciples.

The NVE thing is ironically apt in that it is of course itself complete bollocks: a citizen who holds contrarian views but never attacks things/people cannot by definition be an extremist. He or she might be a radical, eccentric or a satirist, but there’s no law against that; in a liberal democratic society, the holding of minority views is not only tolerated, debate about those views isn’t encouraged enough. Every majority starts off as a minority – it’s the way a healthy, self-renewing democracy works.

When The Slog started out, its main target was muddled bollocks: phrases and words mainly, under the general heading of feminist and ‘liberal’ pc. These included multiculturalism, peace dividend, Arab Spring, Peace flotilla, rainbow of sexuality, at the centre of Europe, rape thought, Islamophobia, hate crime and all the rest of the separation drift that eventually resulted in a messy divorce from reality.

In 2015, the bollocks spectrum is more fiscal, media, geopolitical and economic in nature: QE, Zirp, austerity for growth, aspirational equality, immaterial perjury, our long term plan is working, deficit surplus, libertarian Marxist, setting aside, electoral mistakes, war on terror, bad bank, bailin template, he groomed a nation, level playing field and so forth.

Once a domain almost entirely populated by fluffies, the Land of Let’s Pretend has undergone a massive lebensraum expansion spearheaded by sociopaths. The wishfully unthinking make-believe of the Left now has little more than a Gaza Strip of gullibility: 90% of Loopyland territory is occupied by spooks, bureaucrats, neoliberals, fundamentalists, bankers, media moguls, judges, policemen, and senior politicians answerable largely to corporate and military lobbyists.

In 2010, Harriet Harman’s archaic ideas were at worst tedious and at best hilarious. In 2015, Boris Johnson’s plans are at best socially vicious and at worst geopolitically dangerous.

In 2008, The Slog named this odd couple as the two biggest threats to democracy in Britain. Harman herself realised quite quickly that she was unelectable: having been the eminence rose behind Ed Miliband, I suspect her career is over. BoJo is made of different stuff; his rise to dictatorial power is only just beginning.

If ‘dictatorial power’ seems melodramatic, then I suggest people observe the MO of controlling neoliberal dissemblers in general, and Johnson himself in particular. US foreign policy execution and EU internal disciplinary processes are identical in their willingness to smear any opponent, tell any lie, break any law, change any régime, destroy any economy and kill any Spartacus in pursuit of the dominatory goals they and their globalist allies seek.

During his rise to popularity and prominence, London Mayor Boris Johnson has been caught at – or heavily suspected of – offering to have people beaten up, giving false electoral statistics, serially lying about the 2012 Olympics costs, falsifying taxi emission data, harassing residents in Olympia, conspiring with Newscorp executives to pervert Met Police investigations, blocking the progress of serious sexual offence enquiries, and destroying office recordings in City Hall. He has invested heavily in crowd control infrastructure, and brought dubious foreign money into London in such a manner as to suggest he thinks of the UK capital as some kind of tax haven/slave labour cross between the Cayman Isles and Singapore.

The progress of ruthless disinformation has been accelerated by two factors: the deliberate sowing of confusion – producing divisiveness among the questioning classes; and the apathetic ignorance of the mass of citizens…a condition given life by, variously, desperation, tiredness, media distraction and smug acquiescence. Again with heavy irony, elements as diverse as David Cameron and the Huffington Post have tried to frame the investigation of so-called ‘false flag’ obfuscation as “madcap conspiracy theory”.

The accusations were made at the same time as security services across the West indulged in deliberately fostering doubt by the application of red paint to herrings, and various massive frauds proved that many conspiracy theories were fact. Notable examples of those included the shooting down of planes over Ukraine, Libor rigging, gold market manipulation, Iranian currency destruction, CIA-backed fantasy accusations against Viktor Orban, ClubMed debt bond rates and false climate change data. In a neatly self-fulfilling circle, doubts about stock market ‘glitches’ are quoted as prime examples of non-violent extremism.

Seemingly plausible data to back one case exists alongside equally compelling ‘proof’ in favour of its antithesis. This has played a major role in the creation on the Web of intense subject matter about which there is no debate, just hurled abuse…so certain is each ‘army’ that it is right: paedophilia accusations, events in Ukraine, global warming, 9/11, Greek debt, derivative bets….on and on the list goes. And if anything or anyone penetrates the cover of dry ice, swarms of paid trolls are on hand to claim the existence of invented fact.

I continue to believe passionately that obsession with the pros and cons of each case is a massive waste of effort by the Resistance. For one thing, whether we like it or not, some conspiracy theories show conclusively that the Truth is not Out There. From Jack the Ripper onwards – via Anna Andersen, the Loch Ness Monster, the Grassy Knoll, faked Apollo Moonflights and AIDS as a deliberately developed virus – most widely believed conspiracies have been shown scientifically to be complete hokum. But more importantly, the destruction of trust in ‘news’ has as its prime objective the creation of permanent doubt.

Perhaps the best example of acceptance and its adverse effects is the austerity policy of George Osborne. The one blatant fact at the core of this scam – that austerity savings are homoaeopathic compared to bank bailout costs and national debt maintenance costs – has been smudged, moved, covered and falsified to such an extent now that deficit is seen as debt, and budget surplus as the repayment of that debt. Jobs created, hours worked, wages earned and unemployment levels have been compared, cross-analysed, dissected and charted until doubt is created, fatigue kicks in, and TV interviews leave the audience more confused than they were before.

But the effect between supporters of UKip, Labour, the Greens and LibDems was once more the fruitless mutual trashing of this or that interpretation or detail, and a disastrous splintering of the anti-neoliberal vote. The Conservatives won a majority in their own right at the 2015 General Election because nobody took the simple decision among a diverse Opposition to stick to the one central fraud of Osborne’s policy. They failed to do this because of the mutual enmity forged between those for or against the complexity of climate change data, Green radicalism, immigration statistics, housing needs and economic diversification….all of which impact in one form or another upon fiscal and economic policy.

Those ‘consultants’ advising western politicians on the subject of election communications strategy have made the fatal mistake of combating the confusion sown with slogans that score well in research and simplify. Thus we got the bland ‘A better plan’ from Labour – but still with the general doubt remaining that neither Miliband nor his methodologically dense Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls had a plan at all, let alone a better one.

Ultimately, the biggest single contributor to the success of plausible bollocks is the ability of digital technology to fragment and multiply media formats, while still enabling ownership of those media to remain in very few hands. In this context, Net Neutrality itself is now under severe threat from the fat controllers. A debate barely understood by any outside the wonk community, NN is in fact a very simple threat: if the forces of media invention and confusion are offered a reception and diffusion service for ‘information’ faster then the independent Resistance, then Harry Truman’s old metaphor will become literal reality: a lie will go round the world before the Truth gets its pants on.

Equally, the biggest single mistake made by ideologically driven educationalists after 1980 was to eschew the traditional importance of, and value placed upon, a thirst for knowledge itself and an ability to think for oneself about the interpretation of the knowledge gained. Instead, Thatcher, New Labour and now Camerlot have stuck with brainless process, syllabus obsession, and the bureaucracy of pointless achievement targets.

The willingness to be a rebel drives change. The tolerance of rebels nurtures progress. By contrast, the smearing, framing and rigid exclusion of mavericks and their ideas produces an intolerant and increasingly dictatorial stagnation. We see this in both US Parties, in the German CDU, in the eurogroupe ‘reform’ mantra, in the British Labour Party – and above all in the disgraceful burial alive of the real facts about Greek indebtedness and its root cause, banker psychopathy.

The Bollocks Culture has indeed come of age. It has chosen to slay its estranged twin Fearless Journalism with the flapping jawbones of a million assholes. For every decent human being on the planet, this easily outstrips any other threat to freedom in the entire history of our species.

Politicians are never going to counter that threat because they have been turned by the Body Snatchers, and because they think in 4-5 year cycles. To get real change, we need to take the donation money and lobbying out of politics, take the politics out of health and education, and demonstrate the online power of the Decent Resistance.

49 thoughts on “THE SATURDAY ESSAY: How the Bollocks Culture came of age”

Many Happy Returns to The Slog! I continue to be awed by the volume and quality of your outpourings. Your commentaries are invariably entertaining and well-conceived, even if one doesn’t always agree with them. Thanks for your endeavours over these years – they are always appreciated and well-received in these parts.. Slog on mon brave!

JW, another brilliant piece. I am not clever enough to be the first to start the discussion. However…

they have been turned by the Body Snatchers,

May I humbly suggest for Body Snatchers you insert Zionists. There are laws against denying the Holocaust! Why would they pass such laws? They actually jail people for this. No bankster ever went to jail. ..

I’ve been saying this for six years. I am getting nowhere

Not quite true. Your spirit and big heart is indefatigable and more and people are catching on.

Sadly, the Zionists DO control this planet. Empowered by evil forces not of this world. .

They shell Gaza with impunity. Murdering 2500 women and children, last year alone. They did plan 9/11. And every other terrorist act on the planet.

JW, no will in the population to change it just yet … it will in the end although we may not be here to see it and that may be a blessing in disguise.

To change will require all those with their heads in the sand who refuse through cowardice or foolishly believing that a 4 legged wolf is an osterich to face a bleak reality that to be blunt “scares the shit out of them”. No? Well it for sure shocked me at the start, but you have to face up to the bleakness of this little to no growth world and how all those with power and wealth will slaughter all to preserve themselves at ANY COST!

I would rather go one level up to another group to blame, insert banksters for Zionists. Only some banksters are zionist but there are all races and cultures in this elite group.

All this has been done in the last century since the introduction of unbacked FIAT where to print at no cost you own everything very quickly. Printing 80 billion a month, MOM you can sure buy some real estate for that kind of money.
Banksters will be telling us next that little green men not the zionists are to blame for it all and 90% of the population will want to wage war against mars such is the banksters grip.

John you are getting somewhere,maybe not where you would like to be!but turning a tide of human will takes time & has to start somewhere,you my friend started 6yrs ago & if you look how much of your influence as turned the tide,i think you should be proud!
I have said before anyone standing up will be discredited or their arguments,alternatives will be starved of airtime,all just stages of change,but one thing will not change flat earth economics is exactly that flat stagnation depravity & poverty for humanity body & spirit & the human spirit doesn’t do stagnation it may endure it for some time! but it will rise
“They” feel superior,supreme,so much so that redefining problems is the only solution to “not” solving the actual problems,but those problems aren’t going away & never can,they are breeding their own downfall & refuse to act! “Madness” & not the Madness i saw at donny racecourse.they believe that by the time the youth grow up,that they will be well & truly shackled when they will be anything but!,keep the good work up,it been so successful that they need to stop it!

Forget about grumpy old boilers like me, who turn up to vent our spleen about whatever hobby horse we happen to be flogging this week.

Its the people who go away with a perplexed frown on their face, never leaving a comment about the post that overturned the carefully manufactured platitudes and soundbites which direct their lives. It was for these people Winstone Churchill once wrote –

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth,
but most of them pick themselves up and
hurry off as if nothing had happened”

– Winston Churchill

But bloggs such as yours (assuming there are others !) stop these people in their tracks

These people were suddenly forced to THINK.

In so doing they quickly realise that they have been lying to themselves. Allowing themselves the cold comfort of believing that the alleged government really is there to protect and nuture them. Working for their best interests.

Suddenly they are forced to SEE.

From these many, a tiny fraction will make up their minds to work for CHANGE.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world;
indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
– Margaret Mead, anthropologist.

History has repeatedly demonstrated that. Sadly, it is not always for the greater good of humanity, which is why it is VITAL for good men (and women ) everywhere to stand for something better.

A compliant, lazy, and cowardly press has much to answer for.
One example from the Manchester Evening News where an eagle-eyed journalist quickly spotted that nine out of thirteen in a list of people charged with drug-dealing were teenagers.

See if you can spot something else common in at least ten of them but not mentioned.
They are:
Noor Ali, Shabir Rahman, Emdadur Rahman, Ashaad Noor, Shahidul Hoque, Abdul Malik, Amran Alom, Azad Miah, Hussain Ali, Ruzon Miah, And a 16-year-old boy and two 17-year-old boys who cannot be named.

Nothing stirs a nation like a hungry belly.
The public at large are too fat and comfortable at present, this of course will change but, will it be too late by then? I suspect so for the L.A.W.S. will be in full force and woe betide any who don’t conform.
Movie makers and directors have been showing us the future for years now and folk still refuse to believe it. Who here remembers Capt. Kirk’s ‘Communicator’? Anyone think twice when Motorola produced the first ‘Flip Phone’?
Anybody think for a minute that the US isn’t bent on World domination?
It’s mainly the young today that will bear the brunt of this, for all us ‘oldies’ well, a little too late I fear, we should just sit back and thoroughly enjoy ourselves for it might be all we have left.
It kinda reminds me of the old joke where 2 old men are sitting in wingback armchairs in a dowdy, smelly old folks home and, one say to the other, “Just think, if we hadn’t given up smoking and drinking all those years ago, we would have missed all this”.
Ironically I think that history will just record this as evolution, I can imagine there was a ‘John Ward’ in amongst The Tollpuddle Martyrs, who felt the same way about the way things were going as the current John Ward feels about the way things are now.
Hankering after the past robs us of the future, whatever that future might hold, and it is only our perception and the way we feel about it that really matters. If in doubt, ask a Tibetan Monk for his thoughts on the Greek situation.
It really is all bollocks, more than most of us appreciate.
Just sayin’…

John. Apparently, if you put 60,000,000 frogs into a pan of water and then slowly turn up the heat – even if you write a blog about how it’s gradually getting hotter and all the frogs will get boiled to death, and it really is in their best interests to do something about it, they will do nothing.
Having followed you for the maybe the last 3 years with interest, I now find myself getting outrage fatigue, and I’ve started to think “I wish the elite would get a move on, so I have an excuse to go and man the barricades.”

Recently it became know that Exxon Mobil was very aware of AGW back in the 1980s. Their response? Bury the knowledge and spend billions over the next few decades funding groups opposing action on climate change.

IMO the real conspiracy is not that AGW is a scam; it’s that some of the richest people and corporations on Earth have managed to convince otherwise intelligent and educated folk that climate scientists are liars and only in it for the money.

The press is totally controlled by Zionists. Proof? You only need look at the truly demonic way Israel murders Palestinians… for the last 67 years, and not a murmur. Israel steals land. Israel shells innocent people and blockades medical supplies. How evil is that?! Not a peep. Your honest reporter is fired, and many die in car accidents, or commit suicide. Suicide! Without the Internet, the populace would be truly fu*.ked. And the Zionists are attempting to render encryption illegal. VT refers to them as the RKM. Rothschild Khazarian Mafia.

I don’t agree that you are not getting anywhere, John. You have a good general blog that can spread out over a wide area, contacts around Europe, perhaps even further, with one substantive post a day you can do a lot.

Quite true – indeed.
Is there a case for raising the game to balance the output from the players on the other side of the table? When I was at sandyhouse,(name changed for security reasons) we were taught to meet acts with acts. We were taught a ) invent your identity b) identify your subject with care c) arrange a very sudden but quiet surprise, and d) never ever discuss.
Rinse and repeat every few weeks.

We live under the boot of sensationalists. They care only for the moment, and can not see change ahead of them, and no one else counts. They will try to take it all down, because that is in their interest, for the believe their lifestyle won’t really change as they destroy ours. But they have no clue that those they have charged with their protection are planning their elimination after seeing how useless they truly are. They enjoy spreading fear when the anger and retribution of the masses is held in check. The useless class is currently in charge. There is nothing in their bag of tricks.

Happy Anniversary John
I have been following you daily since the Cyprus debacle and you have changed my life and financial strategy. I bought a house in 2013 directly as a result of your site. I became unsure of having money in banks due to Cyprus and your reporting of it. I got links through your posters to all sorts of other websites to inform myself -and have done so.
As for spreading the word myself – Unfortunately the people I talk to about such matters, are so light years away from my standpoint, it is a bit like pissing in the wind (excuse my French)
How you do all this writing and building I don’t know, alle Achtung , but please, please, continue to inform us as long as they don’t gettya for being a NVE.
Long Live the Non Violent Extremist
Alice in Wonderland

Happy birthday Slog and thank you John for all the posts. I read every day and it’s good to consider all you have to say and equally enjoy reading all the comments. I’m often angry at the insanity of our world and reading like minded views is a comfort and reassurance that others feel the same and can see what’s happening and how mad it all is. The views and information from the Slog is worth so much more than the garbage contained in newspapers. Please carry on, you are much appreciated

John living as you do in France you are less susceptible to neuro linguistic programming as the worker bees in the UK are. No offence to the people living in the UK but you are being programmed into submission by Cultural Marxist totalitarianism. It has taken my nearly 50 years to figure this shit out.

I think France is freer of it (The oppressive Matrix brainwashing) then say Germany as it has a poorly implemented control structure (sounds a bit David Icke eh?) in comp to Germany (Bavaria) which is fully within the Matrix where I live. Corporations rule, freedom is zero. ironically it took living in Saudi Arabia ( which is the worst implemented control structure) to understand what true freedom really was (we lived an underground life to die for – rock bands, home brewed beers and wines, drugs like dope home grown, girls on the sly if you knew where, even Saudi) to understand the Frankfurt School programming.

First Point: “The NVE thing is ironically apt in that it is of course itself complete bollocks: a citizen who holds contrarian views but never attacks things/people cannot by definition be an extremist. He or she might be a radical, eccentric or a satirist, but there’s no law against that;” … YET!
How long do you think it will take, John, to pass legislation on Crimethink? Isn’t the concept of NVE just a precursor of Crimethink?

Second Point: “The Bollocks Culture has indeed come of age. It has chosen to slay its estranged twin Fearless Journalism with the flapping jawbones of a million assholes. For every decent human being on the planet, this easily outstrips any other threat to freedom in the entire history of our species.”
Would you expect any other outcome when most people CHOOSE to vegetate in a state of comfortable apathy and delegate their thinking to the slimiest of the slime, i.e. the Politicians?

Third Point: “The willingness to be a rebel drives change. The tolerance of rebels nurtures progress. By contrast, the smearing, framing and rigid exclusion of mavericks and their ideas produces an intolerant and increasingly dictatorial stagnation. We see this in both US Parties, in the German CDU, in the eurogroupe ‘reform’ mantra, in the British Labour Party – and above all in the disgraceful burial alive of the real facts about Greek indebtedness and its root cause, banker psychopathy.”
From the perspective of the Metaphysics of Quality any imbalace between Dynamic and Static Quality unavoidably leads to disaster. Μέτρον Άριστον is a very simple concept for a balanced and sustainable life.

Fourth Point: “I’ve been saying this for six years. I am getting nowhere.”
You couldn’t be more wrong: a) Your efforts matter and do make a change (visible or not – this is irrelevant), b) Your Slog is a modern-day, virtual Αγορά where intelligent debate takes place. Such polite, intelligent, argument-based and not slogan-based discourse, unfortunately, does not exist elsewhere (at least, to the best of my knowledge and in the languages I have some command of).

Last Point: Each Small Candle Lights a Corner of the Dark. (Roger Waters)

The thing all these guys have in common -from Boris Dave Harman, Od, Bolix and the rest of Westminster, the entire Brussels circus, Washington and the buffoons running US foreign policy- is that they are all incompetent. I don’t even think their vision is fully resolved. Certainly they have no idea how to implement it. They aren’t even making it a better world for themselves. Even Wall St. hasn’t won anything other than a temporary pile of cash. ALL of it reinvested in fake value assets which will end up worth nothing.
This is all a silly game by schoolyard bullies.
The shame is not enough of us care to do anything about it. And probably why should most us bother. Fooled by the promise of plump pensions, a state or big corporation job, our kids with supermarket jobs, or plenty comfortable welfare benefits,,, why risk that.
Better to wake up someday in the ruins they would say.

Your enemy is not those in power. Your actual enemy is those who tolerate them. Don’t expect their support, be happy with every single conversion you make.

Every day is progress. Lots of people are trying to do their bit.
Let’s hope net – neutrality Web survives to keep the word spreading.

Bon anniversaire viel garcon! I first picked up on the slog over at the DT on the Delingpole anti AGW blogspost. You would post a wind up about agw being irrelevant and the real issues were over at your linked blog. Although it transpires that Dellers quest to unearth the truth of his chosen subject wasn’t irelevant but honourable in following your link opened up a whole new world. I for one always log in here first for sound information and may only pop over to DT for market or sports news but can’ be certain these are that trustworthy.

Congrats on keeping up the blog John. I first joined you whilst you were NBY and looking at giving up….. So glad that you kept going as I have ‘met’ some highly interesting people thanks to you as well as educating myself on a range of issues beyond those which brought me here in the first place.

Just to add my own plaudit to those before me…. The Slog is without a doubt my most visited blog in order to educate my brain before venturing elsewhere during the day… Thanks John.

And another:http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2015/07/theres-only-two-year-reprieve-if-sun.html
which has differing opinions (to my previous link) on the length of the slight cooling that would be observed if the sun did enter a Maunder minimum type period, but both show that the cooling effect a) reverses fairly quickly and b) is dwarfed by warming caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases released by human activity.

Mr. Ward,
Your wit and toil on bollocks deconstruction is much appreciated by American “rebels”. Anytime our press “covers” any issue of Euro zone import, I look to your blog for the proper translation of the event.

Rare to have a rational person in this verbose moan-blog; thank you, Rowan. You omitted to mention something that is not obvious to most non-scientists and that is that the people who go into science do not become researchers for the money as there is, on average, not much. They also do not do it for the fame in the conventional sense; many just seek intellectual recognition from their piers, while many others are not even that vain. Most become scientists because they are, inherently, truth and knowledge seekers; something that must surely make them more trustworthy than most. It is their amateur abilities to communicate, self-preserve and stick up for themselves (because of their inherent work-focus and lack of vanity) that makes them such easy targets. Most of the public also do not understand what the pier review process is; something that would be inconceivable in most other professions.